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Uncommon Questions in Review

The eccentric essay questions of the University of Chicago’s “uncommon application” were designed to reveal the emerging self, and to provide “more interesting reading for us during the long winter months,” says Theodore A. O’Neill, who oversees their composition and selection. Mr. O’Neill, who will step down in June after two decades as dean of admissions, comments below on a few favorites.

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As some of you know, modern improvisational comedy originated in Hyde Park on the campus of the University of Chicago with the Compass Players, who went on to become the Second City comedy troupe. Here is a chance to play an improv game yourself (and to complete a college application in the bargain). Construct a dialogue or story that meets the following requirements.

1. Your story should involve two people meeting at the frozen-food section of a supermarket, and incorporate your favorite country song. (We know you have one!)

2. Your story must include each of these four lines taken from pages 1, 13, 31 and 107 of the novel “Sister Carrie” by Theodore Dreiser.

c. Ah the long winter in Chicago — the lights, the crowd, the amusement! This was a great pleasing metropolis after all.

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d. Several times, their eyes accidentally met, and then there poured into hers such a flood of feeling as she had never before experienced.

Note: The intrepid among you may want to strike out on your own. Tell us what book other than Sister Carrie you have chosen and pick one line from pages 1, 13, 31 and 107. Have fun! (We insist!)

“The insistence that they have fun, the kind of insistence that almost always falls flat, was actually heeded. How strange that, at this anxious moment, they were willing to take what must have appeared a great risk. We loved them for their risk-taking.”

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The Chicago author Nelson Algren said, “A writer does well if in his whole life he can tell the story of one street.” Chicagoans, but not just Chicagoans, have always found something instructive, and pleasing, and profound in the stories of their block, of Main Street, of Highway 61, of a farm lane, of the Celestial Highway. Tell us the story of a street, path, road ­­— real or imagined or ­metaphorical.

“Almost from the beginning, students have been asked to reflect on something close to their lives — the customs of their neighborhoods, their coming-of-age rituals. Such a question comforts because every applicant is an expert on his or her own experience or surroundings. Nostalgia, so bittersweet, seems to be a good mode for this exercise in preparing to leave one place behind to inhabit new, as-yet-unknown streets.”

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If you could balance on a tightrope, over what landscape would you walk? (No net.)

“Answers ranged from profound to wacky. One could be balancing between one of the seven deadly sins and one of the virtues, over the tender heart of one’s mother, or over nothingness on a wire strung between being and existence, or over the Pacific Ocean suspended between a Chinese birthplace and a new home in Hartford.”

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Have you ever walked through the aisles of a warehouse store like Costco or Sam’s Club and wondered who would buy a jar of mustard a foot and a half tall? We’ve bought it, but it didn’t stop us from wondering about other things, like absurd eating contests, impulse buys, unimagined uses for mustard, storage, preservatives, notions of bigness and dozens of other ideas both silly and serious. Write an essay inspired by super-huge mustard.

“The jar of mustard wasn’t really a favorite. It obviously led too many students to attack consumerism, and questions that lead students to what they think is a preferred answer don’t really work the way they should.”